Wednesday, 4 September 2013

Moss

Here is one of my rare nature moments, from a few years ago, at university.

I was experimenting with texture in screenprinting. I wanted to build dense prints from layers of simple strokes and flecks.

This piece was intended to be a subtle evocation of damp, velvety mosses on a wall. The staff were not at all sure what I was trying to achieve with this variety of blobs and smudges. I put it down as another instance of me having some atavistic feeling in my head that doesn't translate into reality.

My five-layered screenprint of moss.

Moss, lichen, heather and grasses have two associations for me. The first is homely and human: a part of nature that sits, semi-cultivated, in a human environment, the subject of diligent but leisurely botanical study; knowledgeable but twee. I see shafts of dusty sunlight in the country gardener's shed in an Edwardian children's book.

The second is primal and timeless: windy, prehistoric or post-apocalyptic heath and fenland, silent but for a few marsh birds or the sound of a Jute being scalped in a bog; ancient buildings fallen to ruin and repopulated by unassuming but patient plantlife.

Most of the time I need to make pictures relatively quickly. In my case, that leads to a lot of little people, buildings and boats. But I could enjoy spending weeks in a print room, making backgrounds, surrounded by pots of honesty and heads of pampas grass, studying the leaf-structure of heathers and hebes... and drawing them with a more refined series of blobs and streaks.